Denny Roy
The US policy-making community has gravitated toward a belief that China under Xi Jinping’s leadership is aggressive – specifically, that Beijing wants to seize more territory and seeks to supplant the US role as regional strategic leader and global superpower.
A new article by David C. Kang, Jackie S. H. Wong and Zenobia T. Chen in the prestigious journal International Security argues that this conventional wisdom is “dangerously wrong” and will unnecessarily worsen geopolitical tensions.
This article presumably puts forth some of the best arguments supporting one side of a debate that is vitally important as the US-China rivalry intensifies, making war look increasingly possible.
The authors fail, however, to prove their main assertion that China is essentially a status-quo power with limited and reasonable aims.
To make their case, the authors make three main arguments.
Priorities
First, they say China is focused on things other than expanding its power, influence and territory. Beijing “is concerned about internal challenges more than external threats or expansion,” they say. The PRC government wants only “domestic stability; sovereignty and territorial integrity; and social-economic development.”
Even if internal challenges are the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) highest priority, they can lead to aggressive or bullying behavior abroad. Take regime security, for example. Mao Zedong’s fear that the new CCP regime would not survive the political pressure of a US ally on its border – distinct from the threat of military invasion – was perhaps the crucial consideration in his decision to intervene in the Korean War in 1950.
In an extension of the internal issue of controlling Tibet, China has encroached into and built infrastructure in disputed parts of Bhutan as a means of punishing that country for hosting Tibetan refugees.
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